The first few sentences of this article sold me. Because it describes to me exactly why I hate Rails, and Ember, and any other framework with a similar model. I hate Rails because Rails is Magic. And not the good (well, as good as magic can be), 0x5f3759df kind of magic either.
The kind of magic where you're given some functions to call, and some places to put your code, and if you ask why, you are told that you don't want to know, so shut up. In a non-CoC system, a lot of this magic would be exposed to the developer, so even of we didn't exactly know what was going on behind the scenes, we could at least kind of reason about it.
I hate rails because I like to be able to reason about the code that I write, the libraries I use, and what's going on behind the scenes, even if I don't know ALL the details.
Why? Because I assume that at some point, my code will break. And if I can't reason about what my app's doing, I can't fix it. And after running Ubuntu for a few years, I have long run out of patience for problems I can't fix.
> The kind of magic where you're given some functions to call, and some places to put your code, and if you ask why, you are told that you don't want to know, so shut up.
Rails is open-source and extensively documented. I honestly cannot understand this take at all.
Okay, YES, Rails had docs, but that's the attitude I see: use this, do this, put your code here, we know best. The docs do not ENCOURAGE understanding of how Rails works, or why it is the way it is.
The documentation for getting a blog built in 15 minutes doesn't explain why you put your code in each place or how it's put together, because that's not the point. Rails is about making default decisions for commonly bikeshedded questions like "how do we name our database tables" so you don't waste mental bandwidth on them when you're trying to build an application. But explanations for how and why all that happens is very readily available.
Read the code, then. The docs are for people who want to get stuff up and running. The code itself is what you should read when you want to understand how anything really works.
I shouldn't have to read the code to be able to basically reason about what my app is doing. I don't necessarily want to know EVERYTHING, but I want to know the basics of what's going on.
There is no magic in Rails if you at least give some effort to understand how things work.
But everyone is free to invent their own incomplete and flawed versions which has benefit that you know the magic behind your framework. Alas, no one else does.
Yes, they do. And the difference is that it takes FAR more work to understand what Rails is doing than, say, Flask. Part of it is that Rails hides things from you. Part of it is that Rails is simply more complex. all of it makes it harder to reason about Rails.
The kind of magic where you're given some functions to call, and some places to put your code, and if you ask why, you are told that you don't want to know, so shut up. In a non-CoC system, a lot of this magic would be exposed to the developer, so even of we didn't exactly know what was going on behind the scenes, we could at least kind of reason about it.
I hate rails because I like to be able to reason about the code that I write, the libraries I use, and what's going on behind the scenes, even if I don't know ALL the details.
Why? Because I assume that at some point, my code will break. And if I can't reason about what my app's doing, I can't fix it. And after running Ubuntu for a few years, I have long run out of patience for problems I can't fix.